Microsoft Just Bought GitHub For Some Reason…

It must be nice having tons of money to throw around. Microsoft just made its first major purchase of Satya Nadella era, GitHub. You know, that site where all the open-source nerds host all their projects. For free. Well it turns out that Microsoft is hosting a bunch of their stuff there too since they closed down CodePlex in 2017. I mean sure, it is a cool site, so I can kind of see the appeal, but they bought it for $7.5 Billion! That is like buying a nice little bungalow by the beach for a couple of tons of gold bullion. A slight overspend there.

Here is the thing, while there is a massive amount of data on GitHub, Git is an open-source version control system, and there is nothing, I mean nothing stopping people from making a new GitHub-esque site somewhere else. Not to mention GitHub was only bringing in about $140 Million a year in revenue, so it will add next to nothing to Microsoft’s already massive bottom line. This is nothing more than a vanity purchase. Microsoft wanted to prove that they are down with open-source, so they bought where it is all stored (for the time being).

I just don’t understand it. Hosting a bunch of projects on GitHub already sent the message Microsoft was trying to make, and if it is a code ownership thing, Microsoft could have made their own Git site in the blink of an eye, but so can all those aforementioned open-source nerds, so now it is just a count down until GitHub becomes an empty wasteland as the multitude of anti-Microsoft code jockeys leave to self made geekier pastures.